Today businesses are increasingly using outbound contact campaigns over a variety of channels such as e-mail, facsimile, regular postal mail, telephonic communication and the like, to market their products and services. Of these various channels, telephonic communications is the most popular and widely preferred contact campaign channel used to reach consumers.
Typically, a business will identify a service or product which it desires to market to consumers. A market analyst will then identify individuals which are believed to be likely candidates for purchasing the service or the product. The individual names and telephone numbers of these identified consumers may be acquired from a variety of sources, such as organizations external to the selling business, which compile and sell large amounts of information about consumers, internal customer data stores controlled by the selling business, and the like.
Often business or marketing analysts will mine a plurality of internal data stores using a variety of existing automated customer relationship management tools, such as, for example, NCR Corporation's Relationship Optimizer™ solution, in order to define appropriate profiles of potential customers, and to correspondingly restrict the contact campaign to the potential customers matching the profiles. These data stores typically consist of historical information gathered from past campaigns and historical customer information collected during past interactions of all types with the customer, such as prior purchases, credit applications, web site interactions, and others.
After a campaign is identified, and a contact list created, a variety of existing automated software packages permit the campaign to be automatically managed, placing calls to the targeted customers and connecting the calls (after the customer answers) to the next available customer service representative. For example, the contact list may be electronically provided to a Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) software package (e.g. Genesys, Geotel, and the like), wherein a record for each contact is maintained electronically and logically hooked to a customer database where additional information about a contacted customer may be acquired and provided to the representative during the contact. The CTI packages typically do not require representative's to dial any telephone numbers, rather contact with a potential customer is handled automatically by the package.
In addition to using CTI's, businesses with outgoing contact campaigns often utilize any one of a variety of internal business front office applications, such as, for example, Vantive, SilkNet, Siebel, ONYX, and Clarify to manage the internal operational aspects of the campaign. These front office application's typically permit modifications to fields in the internal customer database, and provide a wide range of electronic screens that appear on a representative's workstation display in real-time when a call is delivered to a representative, in order to provide the representative with a range of additional information about the potential customer. This additional information will have been previously mined from the data stores and analyzed to determine that most useful to the representative, such as customer preferences, marketing segments, and the like.
As front office applications and data mining techniques become increasingly more sophisticated, these software applications are providing representative's with ever increasing amounts of data in real-time regarding customer contacts. This data may include demographic information about the potential customer, past purchase history, customer value to the business, and the like. Accordingly, to accommodate all the available information often many screens or windows within the same front office application must be consulted by the representative prior to or during a customer contact in order for the representative to fully synthesize the data into a mental image of the types of products purchased by the customer in the past, as well as those most likely to be purchased during the present interaction. Furthermore, the information is often presented as text fields or lists on the representative's workstation screen, requiring the representative to read through the information in order to assimilate it.
While the large amounts of available data increase the business's potential for a successful outcome with each contacted customer, it also decreases the efficiency of each representative by increasing the amount of time spent by the representative on each contact. The increased time per contact decreases the number of potential contacts a representative is able to reach within a given time period, and also may hinder sales to existing contacts, who may become irritated or turned off by the slower pace at which the representative is able to conduct the interaction. Thus, decreasing the efficiency of the representative negatively impacts the business, by reducing the total number of potential customer contacts and, therefore, successful contacts that can be achieved by the representative during a given time period.
Aside from outbound call campaigns, representative's who deal directly with potential customers in face-to-face transactions, such as in a retail store or bank, also frequently have a need for detailed, personalized information regarding the customer and the customer's past purchases, as well as related products and services. As with representative's in a call center, this customer information is typically presented to the representative through a front office application, in which the representative must read through multiple windows or screens, with the customer present, in order to assimilate the customer's data. As in the call center environment, this need to review data across multiple windows or screens while actively engaged with the customer tends to reduce the efficiency of the representative, and reduce the potential for successful sales.
Accordingly, to enable a customer service or sales representative to assimilate a large amount of customer data while simultaneously maintaining a high level of customer contacts and successful transactions, it is desirable to provide the customer data in a format in which it can be easily reviewed and assimilated by the representative. In particular, it is desirable for the representative to be able to quickly and efficiently identify the products or services previously purchased by the customer, as well as other related products or services most likely to be purchased by the customer during the interaction. In addition, it would be beneficial for the customer data to be visually presented to the representative in a graphical, summarized format, to reduce the time required to assimilate the data, and to enable the representative to capture “at a glance” a comprehensive understanding of the customer and their purchasing history and propensities. Further, it is desirable to not only present graphically summarized customer data to a representative, but also to suggest a sales approach based upon the data.